this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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I love this topic, keep the comments going! It gets even wilder/weirder when reading historical German monastary documents from the early modern period that sometimes mixed German numerical grammar with latin letters and abbreviations. For example this was a common way to write prices in the early 17th century in my region of study:
All of this was in early modern German Kurrent (old cursive), of course, and with not always obvious whitespaces inbetween. The letters v and x looked somewhat similar, too, and you better don't miss the small strikethroughs anywhere in the lower or upper end of a letter which indicated "minus half" (except for the letter capital C which always has it). This is the kind of fun that brings me joy during my day while simultaneously providing the content for nightmares at night.
For some closure:
The short example would read as: (10+(5-1))*100 + 50+((5+3)-0.5) florin, 10+10+5 batzen, and 1+1+1 denari.
And that would translate to a price of 1457 ½ florin (guilders), 25 batzen (silver coin) and 3 denari (pennies).
Am I correct in thinking that this would be a relatively enormous amount of money for a normal person in that time?
Yes, absolutely! My work is related to monasteries. Some of these institutions were large economical organisations with hundreds or thousands of affiliated workers (in addition to the few dozens of actual clergy) stretching hundreds of villages/cities. Monastaries basically were the major corporations of the time. They did handle these amounts of money regularly.
Historical purchasing power for anything before the industrial revolution is hard to approximate. On the one hand because wages were not only payed in money, on the other hand because labor was very cheap and material cost was high - the inverse of today. To illustrate: They did lots of recycling work that would seem fanatical to us today, e.g. straightening old nails, reusing stones and wood from deconstructions, or even excavating and resharpening rotten fenceposts. To add some general and very rough perspective: An unskilled worker/day-worker could expect a yearly wage in the order of magnitude of about 5 fl (guilders) per year for very hard work and long working hours for 6 or 7 days a week (payed daily in non-face-value coins like pennies). However, it was common for wages to include living accomodation and/or food staples (that included wine or beer) - or pay out the worth of these things, separately. A pair of shoes was a valued gift one could give to an unskilled worker on special occasions.
It was a different time with different societal and economical systems in place. Estimated simplifications you might read online (e.g. 1 fl = 50€) are therefor to be taken with a buttload of salt - to the point one might call it a misrepresentation. Then there were the multiple events with increased silver and gold imports from the new world (combined with some greedy/desperate lords reducing the silver share of their coins). This led to multiple changes in the exchange rates between various regional gold, silver and non-face-value coins of the same names, complicating thing even more.
To solve these issues, the prices I named above would be in fictional coins of account, not actual physical coins that were payed. People had to do quite some math when doing accounting - and yes, minor errors happened all the time.
This sounds fascinating. I was always fascinated how complicated life could be in days past. Like how we take decimalization for granted today or the cheap conversion of money and the enormous availability of modern currency (i.e. Paper money and coins).
I once read about coin shortages and how that could impact an entire region. Fascinating stuff.
Do you happen to have book recommendations on the topic of coins or economic history of Europe (or even more specifically the German speaking area)?
If you happen to speak German I'd recommend "Das Geld der Deutschen" by Bernd Sprenger for an overview as he touches a lot of eras and different subtopics, starting from antiquity and ending with the Euro. Alternatively, "Kleine Geschichte des Geldes" by Michael North is another popular (and a little newer) survey book that I enjoyed. The most insightful parts for me were the in-depth explanations of the concept of bill of exchanges and cashless payments in general during the early modern period.
Since my focus is on monastaries and money is only one aspect, I did not research this sub topic comprehensively, even if it interests me personally - hence I conveniently didn't search much further than mostly German literature. I just checked: The only "English book" on the topic from my bibliography is the conference proceedings "Münzprägung, Geldumlauf und Wechselkurse" / "Minting, Monetary Circulation and Exchange Rates" (Trier Historische Forschungen, volume 7) from 1984. It is a little older but was still worthwhile to me, quite recently. Despite the name it only includes a few German but mostly English essays. They are not limited geographically to the German lands. As a small word of caution: Some of the essays are rather theoretical by nature, so this might not be the very best entry point if you want an overview, or you could simply skip these essays.
I do not love to recommend it here, but asking the English collegues on reddit via /r/AskHistorians might give you a much better answer if you're looking for good entry-level English literature on the topic. They also provide a list of recommended books that features a small "Political and Economic History" section. They included a book by Joseph Gies and Frances Gies that looks quite promising (but focuses on the time 1000-1500). Other than that I cannot find anything particularly relevant in that list. Asking over there might be worthwhile, though.
I am actually German so thank you for all the recommendations! I will check out some of the books (even though I know it will take me some time to get to them. I have a rather long reading list, but I will check them out!)
It's a pretty enormous amount of money now. I was thinking that a gold coin was 1oz which would have been an insane amount of money but some research has told me that guilder can refer to several different coins that are between .08oz and .11oz of gold mixed with other precious metals. Ignoring the other precious metals and assuming the lowest gold content 1457.5 guilders is a bit over 116 oz of gold. Gold is approx. $1900/oz so in gold alone that is over $220,000.